‘Acapulco Shore’: The best in binge-worthy foreign trash TV
Do you love trash TV? It’s fine – you’re only human and you’re entitled to make mistakes and waste this precious thing we call life watching vapid mouth-breathers play Pass the Chlamydia with each other for an hour or so every now and again. It’s fine and because it’s so fine. Here are eight shows from around the globe you can waste your sweet-ass time with binging on Netflix right now!
Love Island
Like Ernest Hemingway once said (and Se7en also borrowed from him), “The world is a beautiful place and one worth fighting for,” but if he’d have seen Love Island, ol’ Big Papa might have changed his tune.
Love Island’s essentially a Dantesque level of hell where the most abhorrent people you could possibly imagine pretend that they’ve fallen in love with each other to gain some sort of fleeting fame after the show. Apparently it’s a gameshow to. Though what the prize is no one is sure. Maybe it’s Love. Or maybe it’s as previously mentioned, chlamydia.
Acapulco Shore
This hard-hitting Spanish drama looks at the complex and often . . . just kidding! Look at the title, for crying out loud. Though if you couldn’t figure out what the show was going to be from the title, this is probably right at your intellectual level.
Beautiful people hook up, they argue, they hope for some sort of empty pointless fame after the show finishes. Hey, if it was that terrible it wouldn’t even be on TV, so don’t feel too bad about giving it a go.
Embarrassing Bodies
On paper, a show that invites people to come on TV and show off some bizarre health condition that they’ve got might sound very flawed. Because for one, who would go on such a show? And secondly, who would watch such a show? It turns out, plenty of both!
The show has been on in the UK for some time now so you’ve got plenty of weird skin conditions, rare diseases, and unsightly appendages to look at. But maybe not when you’re eating.
The Love Wagon
Whether you call it Ride Together, Car Pool, or Love Ride, it’s all pretty much the same thing. A group of young people travel the world (or Asia at least) in a pink van with the pretty thinly added storyline that they must return to Japan still in the same couple that they left in. You can always pretend that it’s not the hook ups and fall outs that you like and it’s just the breathtaking views (which in fairness are pretty nice).
Good Morning Call
“Nao rents her dream apartment, but things are not what they seem when she finds out she will be sharing it with high school heart throb Uehara.” It’s a situation we’ve all been in and that’s why it’s so relatable. Except it’s not but it’s the kind of TV that lets you leave your brain with the man at the door so you can forget about work for a while and dream about what it would be like to be a teenage heartthrob (again).
Terrace House
What’s more fun than watching people you don’t know walk around Hawaii or Tokyo getting into slightly unrealistic adventures with each other and generally acting silly because they’re not talented enough to be actors? Nothing is. Well, except Terrace House because that’s exactly what the show is!
Busted!
In this South Korean TV show, a group of entertainers are taken to a house to become detectives and solve various crimes including murders. (Not real ones though, obviously.) The whole show doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t, so why not put off watching that new hard-hitting cop drama for the night and instead get stuck right into some thoroughly stupid and highly entertaining nonsense?
El Internado
This Spanish show focuses on the students of a fictional boarding school in a forest far from the city where macabre events occur, and it’s actually pretty watchable. It is very cheaply made by the looks of things (like, filming it on an iPhone might have been a better idea in a lot of ways) and it’s aimed at teenagers, but that doesn’t make it any less aimed at you, who was also once a teenager.
100% Hotter
While most makeover shows are just that, 100% Hotter is a makeunder show. So now that we’ve piqued your interest with this amazing twist in the format, why not take a seat and watch some people who wanted to be on TV to show off how original they are made to look just as normal as the rest of us? But they will be 100% hotter, and that’s surely the main thing.
